1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to Internet infrastructures; and, more particularly, to search engines operating on the Internet.
2. Related Art
Search engines are widely used to navigate the Internet and to obtain search results or web links that provide wanted information. Such search information is often derived with only a few search words in a search string as input. The users may look for web pages through a variety of searches that reflect a variety of interests such as business, medical, social, engineering, and scientific research, as well as home-based or personal general interests. Search engines usually select search result web links based upon a search keyword (or, search string) and rank-order search results for presentation to a user based on the popularity of the web links.
The users may be interested, for example, in certain topic area such as business, medical, social, engineering, and scientific research, as well as home-based or personal general interests. Not all of the web links presented as search results are useful to the user, as many of the search results fall way out of user's target area of search or area of interest.
Often, web links that are genuinely helpful to the user are hidden somewhere in the end of search result list or embedded within a mass of thousands of search results, most not of interest to the user. Therefore, the few relevant search result or web pages in the long list of search results are practically unavailable to the user. These relevant search results may not percolate to the top of the search result list because they are not generally popular web links on the Internet (even though they may be exactly what the user is looking for) and the search engines typically pushes only popular web sites to the top of the search result lists for early presentation to the user. This logic assumes that when various users are using the same search words or search string that they are interested in the same few web links. Today's search engines typically ignore these errors and disconnects between the specific user and search results, and as a result, many (and sometimes all) of the search results or web links presented to the user for a search will waste significant amounts of the user's time, often resulting in frustration and/or abandonment of the search.
For example, a user may enter a search string typed in as ‘car driving instructions’. The user may be seeking to find out what kind of precautions need to be taken to drive a specific kind of a car in certain conditions. The search results typically provide at the top search results and web links various pages and content from popular car manufacturers as well as other car sales/dealership companies. Thus, the user's interest in searching for safety and car operation instructions has failed or taken up too much user time because these relevant web links on safety and driving (if any are present at all) are often buried somewhere in the middle or at the end of a very long search result list (a list containing hundreds or thousands or more of search results). Therefore, a need exists for more efficient searching and provision of search results that correlated or relate better to user search interests.
These and other limitations and deficiencies associated with the related art may be more fully appreciated by those skilled in the art after comparing such related art with various aspects of the present invention as set forth herein with reference to the figures.